By combining expertise in photonics - manipulating light beams in nanoscale waveguides on a chip – and materials science, Cornell researchers have laid the groundwork for a chemical sensor on a chip that could be used in ...

Just days ahead of the Olympic Games the waterways of Rio de Janeiro are as filthy as ever, contaminated with raw human sewage teeming with dangerous viruses and bacteria, according to a 16-month-long study commissioned by ...

A new study suggests that improvements in air quality over the Potomac watershed, including the Washington, D.C., metro area, may be responsible for recent progress on water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists from ...

It is imperative that society learn more about how climate change contributes to episodic and very severe water quality impairments, such as the harmful algal bloom that caused Florida to declare a state of emergency earlier ...

Water quality scientist Laura Christianson is working on a solution to the "dead zone"—an area with dangerously low levels of oxygen— in the Gulf of Mexico. Christianson lives over a thousand miles north of the Gulf in ...

Using what is known as a Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), scientists with the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture have modeled what would happen if Tennessee soybean and corn farmers incorporated an unfertilized ...

A team of Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) researchers has succeeded in creating an independent sewerage treatment plant (i-STP), said to be the first of its kind in this country, for the treatment of sewerage in remote places ...

Water quality

Water quality is the physical, chemical and biological characteristics of water. It is most frequently used by reference to a set of standards against which compliance can be assessed. The most common standards used to assess water quality relate to drinking water, safety of human contact, and for health of ecosystems.